Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Most people easy to convince they committed a crime that never happened – study

With enough personal background information about someone’s past, an
interviewer can quite easily manipulate that person into confessing to a
crime that he or she did not commit – or which never even happened,
alleges a new study.

Researchers from
Britain's University of Bedfordshire and Canada's University of
British Columbia based their study on a questionnaire filled out
by the primary caregivers of 60 university students. The
relatives were requested to describe events that the students
experienced between the ages of 11 and 14.

Upon receiving the surveys, psychologists then questioned the
students themselves about their past experiences, in a series of
three 40-minute “friendly” interviews.

Researchers announced that 70 percent of participants were
eventually tricked into believing they committed a crime –
including theft, assault, or assault with a weapon – that led to
police questioning.

The research, published in Psychological Science, shows that
those students surveyed internalized the stories they were told,
later re-telling them in great detail – even though they never
took place. With “suggestive memory-retrieval
techniques,” those questioned generated “criminal and
noncriminal emotional false memories” that were compared with
“true memories of emotional events,” the
study says.

During the first line of questioning, researchers spoke to each
student about two events he or she went through as a teen – with
only one of those events being real. Participants were asked to
recall what happened in each of the occurrences.

When test subjects had trouble explaining the false event, the
psychologist pushed on and encouraged them to recall either way,
explaining to them that if they used “specific memory
strategies” they might remember more.

During the second and third interviews, the researchers again
asked the participants to remember as much as they could about
both events.

“All participants need to generate a richly detailed false
memory is 3 hours in a friendly interview environment, where the
interviewer introduces a few wrong details and uses poor
memory-retrieval techniques,” Julia Shaw of the University
of Bedfordshire, a co-author of the study, said in a
statement.

“In such circumstances, inherently fallible and
reconstructive memory processes can quite readily generate false
recollections with astonishing realism,” said Shaw. “In
these sessions we had some participants recalling incredibly
vivid details and re-enacting crimes they never committed.”

Screenshot from http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/01/14/0956797614562862.abstract

This is the first study of its kind that provides evidence
suggesting that “full episodic false memories of committing
crime can be generated in a controlled experimental
setting,” the paper says.

Out of the 30 students whose “false event” involved some
criminal activity, 21 were classified by the authors as having
developed a “false memory” of the crime following the
interviews. Eleven out of 15 students whose “crime”
involved assaults or armed assault described the nature and
“details of their exact dealings with police.”

The participants who were classified as having false memories of
committing a crime indicated that they had later tried to recall
and visualize the false event at home, five times on average, and
had “low suspicion that the interviewer was trying to
manipulate them somehow.”

“Understanding that these complex false memories exist, and
that ‘normal’ individuals can be led to generate them quite
easily, is the first step in preventing them from
happening,” Shaw concluded. “By empirically
demonstrating the harm ‘bad’ interview techniques – those which
are known to cause false memories – can cause, we can more
readily convince interviewers to avoid them and to use ‘good’
techniques instead.”

Quotes

"There is beauty in truth, even if it's painful. Those who lie, twist life so that it looks tasty to the lazy, brilliant to the ignorant, and powerful to the weak. But lies only strengthen our defects. They don't teach us anything, help anything, fix anything or cure anything. Nor do they develop one's character, one's mind, one's heart or one's soul." Jose Harris

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